The Achievement of E. M. Forster - Humanities-Ebooks

Aspects of a Novelist
Forster reminds us of a world where the will is not everything, of a world of true
order, of the necessary connection of passion and prose, and of the strange paradoxes
of being human. He is one of those who raise the shield of Achilles, which
is the moral intelligence of art, against the panic and emptiness which make their
onset when the will is tired from its own excess.
For many readers, this sums up certain positive effects of the novels with economy
and deftness. It defines the ‘singleness’ of them.
But if there is a singleness in the novels, there is also a complexity: and that
complexity is not simply, shall we say, the result of interweaving prosaic and passionate
elements. It is a complexity which reminds us that Forster is ultimately a
romantic writer and that his work reflects some of the tensions and conflicts peculiar
to romanticism.
Nothing has yet taken the place of romanticism in the West. We are still romantics
by birth, however much we may disguise our romanticism by devices such as cynicism
or understatement. But since 1914 much of the original impetus of romanticism
has been lost. It has lost its innocence in the face of Freud, its idealism in face of the
events and policies of two world wars, and its positiveness in face of a world that
becomes steadily more complex. It is not dead: most modern attitudes are romantic
attitudes. But the fact that we describe them as ‘attitudes’ betrays the difference.
The peculiar forces which drove romanticism between the French Revolution and
the First World War, enabling it to inspire a whole way of life, have gone. They will
hardly combine again in a similar pattern.
To understand Forster fully, one has to see him at the end of that earlier phase, the
spiritual heir of Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, of Beethoven and Wagner. He shares
their aspirations and their struggles, while counterpoising them with his grasp of
human affairs. The fact that both factors are present in his thinking inevitably affects
his work. The straightforward run of the plot is not usually disrupted, but is sometimes
diverted or distorted by this very individual attitude of the author’s.
The exact nature of his romantic struggle will emerge later. It is sometimes critical,
but rarely agonizing. His sense of reality is always vigilant, curbing his inward vision:
and this sense of reality includes certain inbred attitudes which mediate between warring
elements or damp their effect.
Forster was brought up within that stratum of the upper middle class which prides
itself on its sense of humour and tends to view human affairs with an amused detachment.
At its extreme, indeed, it might be said to cultivate the wit of Jane Austen while
Trilling, op. cit., 158.